Give the kid a break! Could you do half as well as he did at his age? I teach at a college and he writes better than most of my students!
There’s nothing wrong with the age group - I’ve read lots of quality content from young writers. This article could have been better after a couple revisions and if the author had a bit more experience, that’s all. It would be a great article on another site, but I hold SitePoint to a higher standard.
Oookay, Mr. Anonymous.
This thread is for all opinions, not just positive ones.
I think it’s a bit condescending to imply that simply because I don’t like the article I couldn’t do a review myself. I’ve written dozens of articles for all kinds of sites and magazines, and am quite used to the criticism.
It comes with the territory. Peer review makes you a better writer.
J
I didn’t know CGI was a language… Last time I checked, Perl was a language.
David (Olate), I think you did a fairly good job with the review.
Still, I was fairly disappointed to see “CGI” used where “Perl” would have been more appropriate. I wonder what is SitePoint’s policy with editing published articles. You could get them to make changes to the article from the feedback here. That’s one of the reasons we have feedback, at least IMO! 
Hey, I am open to all suggestions and this is what this topic is for - not to say how bad, in your opinion, the article was - so I’d like to see some constructive crtiticsm so I can improve my writing in the future.
The article is not written to be an in depth thesis on forum software but an overview that website owners can use to help them make the decision in choosing the right software for them.
As for individual comments:
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I couldn’t measure the CPU usage as I only installed and briefly looked at the systems being used and reviewed the features available. Same applies for upgradbility, performance, user sastifaction etc.
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I didn’t think up the title for the article - that is decided by the editor and will only be changed if it is really necessary.
I think it might be a good idea to get the Sitepoint editors to remove my age from the site as this is being used as a base for unconstructive criticism 
Yes, my mistake. I’ve haven’t really used CGI/Perl much as was not aware of the difference.
The installation of phpBB is very simple. The download is only 657kb as a .zip file (.gzip is available).
You mean tar.gz?
IVB is spelt wrong, IPB
DMB database is also wrong, it’s called DBM
The initial upload of all the files is large – over 4mb –
Mine’s 3.54Mb…
Even though it uses CGI, there is barely a noticeable decrease in speed
You gotta be kidding on this one…many many webhosts banned the use of iB for being a ressource hog since it use CGI and each request calls the perl interpreter…unless mod_perl/mod_fastcgi is installed with Apache
PHP can also be ran through CGI, but you wouldn’t appreciate the performance decrease (3 times slower!) :agree:
Edit: Ok IVB and CGI/perl have already been reported…
What is the support ticket id of your request that you sent to the sales department? We have given demos to people for reviews in the past and accomoedated anyone wanting to review our software.
Wayne Luke
vBulletin Sales.
There is an inaccuracy in the section on phpBB. The article claims that phpBB is based on the Smarty template system. This is incorrect. phpBB uses its own template system written in PHP. phpBB’s template system is significantly less efficient than Smarty.
Upon downloading phpBB and peeking at the files, it is quite easy to see that it does not use Smarty. I don’t believe the review was very thorough or informed.
This major inaccuracy on the first page leads me to believe there may be a number of inaccuracies throughout the article. I am not as familiar with the other boards as I am with phpBB, and I do not trust this article to contain accurate information.
No, I mean gZIP. If you go to http://www.phpbb.com/downloads.php you see there are 2 options - zip and gZIP. I fully understand that the gZIP file format is tar.gz.
Yes, we have already established that.
Please, I only tried this for a few moments so I could review the features and therefore I’m unable to comment on how many resources it uses. :mad:
I asked via your LiveChat and was told that I couldn’t ‘for obvious reasons’.
I thought that it was based around Smarty, however, I just checked on the phpBB forums at it appears it is more based around phpLib:
I wonder if anyone knows what IPB use as template engine
I do anyway 
ikonboard is the best forum software around
Countryboy03
Article was informative and a nice read in the bathroom. However I wouldn’t base my opinion regarding forum software on that article. I am quite young, too and he did write two other, good articles already.
I’d also blame it on the editor than on the author. Heads up man !
I beg your pardon? Are you saying that adults write better articles? Many of you are commenting on vBulletin wasn’t in there. He explained that 
He also tried to get a copy of vB so he could review it.
Also back to the whole “More articles from adults please” thing. I thought his article was extremly good to come from a 15 year old. You also shouldn’t judge based on age. Many younger people could produce better work than many adults.
Although it’s not the best article I’ve read I give it an 8 out of 10. Don’t be discouraged by the feedback your getting from this article. Keep up and you’ll become a great author.
I don’t really see the use. It isn’t a fully Forum Roundup, and the forum software that is there he didn’t even test extensively. It’s more of a “for those who don’t want to read the features pages for 5 forums” type of article. It isn’t anymore indepth than that, and that is the author’s responsibility.
G and the editorial team don’t confine the author and will never say “no, sorry, that’s too useful and will be too much work for you, don’t do that”.
J
I don’t think it was meant to be an in-dept review.
I agree with Wayne. No offense against the author, but it’s unusual for SP to publish articles as incomplete as this. I’ve been asked or assigned similar articles in the past which have often required much more work.
For example, an article I didn’t end up doing that I was asked to do was a “lead by example” type tutorial for creating a Windows, web and web-service-based notes and scheduling application.
I was to do it in .NET (using C#, VB.NET and JScript.NET), PHP and CFM.
That’s 15 separate applications and code samples for one article (series). Sure, it would have been a great resource and everything, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as useful if it had, for instance, been only a Windows version in .NET using C# and a PHP web-based version.
Like Wayne I’ve come to expect more from SP, and that’s almost entirely because of my experience with the editorial team. I don’t think it’s fair to blame them, unless of course some major changes have happened so that the people and standards I knew aren’t around or applicable anymore.
Just seems like misrepresentation and not enough research to me.
J
If he had went through the official support ticket system by contacting sales @vbulletin.com, he could have gotten a demo.
We get an average of 1,000 requests for a “free version” of vBulletin through the live chat a week. With ploys that include everything from non-profit organizations to the starving student routine. If it had been made clear that he was writing an article for SitePoint, which has been a long-time customer and supporter of vBulletin through advertising, and interviews, the sales team would have made sure that some sort of demo was setup if not a copy of the software distributed to him.
Furthermore, there is a demo freely accessible from our website located at www.vbulletin.com/admindemo with full access to the adminstration control panel.
It shouldn’t be called a Forum Roundup if it doesn’t include the biggest players in the game which for small to medium sites includes UBB.classic, UBB.Threads and vBulletin. Even with that there are about a dozen other free boards that could have been included such as Phorum, OpenBB, XMB, and YABBSE. The title is misleading and there is not enough information in the article to allow consumers to make a valid decision on finding software for their needs.
I should add that I am more disappointed in SitePoint publishing an incomplete article such as this more than the authorship. More effort on both their parts would have gone a long way though.